"Ozcan, a researcher at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, makes the analogy that a traditional optical microscope is like a huge set of pipes delivering content, in the form of images, to the user. Over years of development, bottlenecks occur that impede further improvement. Even if one part of the system - that is, one bottleneck - is improved, other bottlenecks keep that improvement from being fully realized. Not so with the lens-free system, according to Ozcan."